Penn Museum opens new Middle East Galleries
ARTDAILY
PHILADELPHIA---Founded in 1887, the Penn Museum sent the first United States archaeological expedition to the Middle East—to the ancient Mesopotamian site of Nippur in what was then the Ottoman Empire. More than 130 years and hundreds of international expeditions later, the Museum remains a world leader in Near Eastern archaeology, with a collection of more than 100,000 artifacts; a leading collection of cuneiform tablets bearing early literary, historical, and economic texts; strong Islamic period ethnographic and literary collections; and a rich archive of historic documents, field notes, and photographs—as well as ongoing research projects in the region. [More]
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| Bull Lyre constructed with gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell, bitumen and wood, ca 2450 BCE at Ur (in modern-day Iraq). Image courtesy of the Penn Museum and Doring Kindersley, Image #250852)) |